I remember how it was -- JR
It's not just the Ivies: Public universities must answer for their moral rot too
So far, almost all the critical focus on how university leaders have manifestly failed to address rampant antisemitism on their campuses has been aimed at selective, private universities. It was the presidents of Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for example, who testified to Congress last week on the issue and now face the brunt of the backlash.
But many state universities are just as culpable. The ideology undergirding the obsession with diversity, equity, and inclusion is also fueling Jew hatred at their institutions. It is also out of control at public universities, where there are more obvious policy levers to rein in antisemitism.
Unlike schools in the Ivy League or colleges such as MIT, which are private, state schools are public institutions predominantly supported by tax dollars, which makes them entirely accountable to voters and, thus, to governors, state legislatures, and boards of trustees. Harvard, Yale, and other private institutions still get plenty of taxpayer support (in the billions), but the subsidy is more indirect, and they are not answerable to voters for their policies.
One public university that warrants critical attention is George Mason University. Its main campus in Fairfax, Virginia, may be a few hundred miles south of the Ivy cluster, but it nonetheless has severe problems with antisemitism on campus and a president as attached to DEI ideology as Harvard’s Claudine Gay or Penn's Liz Magill. And while Gay has come under heavy criticism after a horrendous hearing performance and evidence of plagiarism, and Magill was outright fired, George Mason President Gregory Washington retains his job and has escaped scrutiny.
He became president in 2020 amid the nationwide Black Lives Matter riots and has a record no better than Gay or Magill. Among the very first actions Washington took as president were to create an “anti-racism taskforce,” to add to curriculum statements on how racism would be opposed in each subject, and to order the building of a memorial to the slaves that the university’s namesake owned two centuries earlier.
Research published by the two of us this year showed that George Mason under Washington has accumulated the most bloated DEI bureaucracy in the Old Dominion . Washington groused very publicly about our numbers after our paper was published.
He promised to demonstrate how we were wrong. But all that a review he called has done is change definitions around. For example, the chief of staff of a DEI officer now is not identified as working on DEI. Presto — linguistic gymnastics made the DEI bloat disappear.
In other words, Washington has doubled down on the woke DEI efforts that people now understand induced students across the country to be so ethically challenged that they supported Hamas over their Jewish victims following the terrorist group’s mass killing and rapes in Israel on Oct. 7.
Small wonder that Mason’s campus was one of the earliest and largest scenes of pro-terrorist demonstrations by such radical groups as Students for Justice in Palestine. Masked pro-Hamas student protesters were allowed into a full meeting of the Board of Visitors on Nov. 30, at which they accused the board members of complicity in the “genocidal murder” of Palestinians and that ended with the genocidal “from the river to the sea” slogan. Washington sat there impassively.
When a group of law school professors signed a letter of protest demanding an explanation, Washington just ignored them .
The anti-Israel protesters have also been marching around Mason’s campus chanting genocidal slogans while wearing keffiyehs to cover their faces despite a Virginia statute prohibiting the use of face coverings in public to conceal one’s identity.
Washington has refused to strictly enforce that prohibition despite the fact that the law was originally adopted to crack down on the KKK and despite Virginia’s attorney general sending him a letter specifically instructing him to enforce the law.
Washington’s failure to have George Mason police arrest those violating this law demonstrates that he has more concern for those harassing Jews on campus than he does for the Jews being abused.
Like Gay, Washington’s failure as a university president is not confined to his DEI obsession and callous indifference to the well-being of Jews on campus. Washington has been derelict on other things that matter.
Last week, the American Bar Association put Mason’s prestigious Scalia Law School on probation for lacking “sufficient current and anticipated financial resources” to carry out its education mission.
That probation occurred because Washington proposed across-the-board budget cuts. While he rescinded the cuts for the Scalia Law School, publicly declaring that their funds could be in jeopardy led the ABA to believe that the school’s financial situation was precarious.
Given that the law school is one of the few pockets at Mason, or in academia in general, that is welcoming to conservatives, it is possible that Washington didn’t mind getting them into hot water with the ABA.
Decisive university leaders concentrate budget cuts on areas of the university that are both educationally unsound and significant money losers, such as DEI bureaucracies and gender and ethnic studies departments. But Washington is not that kind of leader and would never place his beloved DEI in jeopardy.
The next round of congressional hearings on higher ed’s Jew-hatred problem should bring the bad-acting leaders of public universities to answer questions. We expect if they bring George Mason’s Washington, he is unlikely to fare better than Magill or Gay.
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New Education Model Charts Course for ‘Success Sequence’ in New Year
Just in time for Christmas, new data finds good news on education: Average graduation rates nationwide are up two percentage points.
Before celebrating, though, research reminds us that students still are posting low scores in national and international comparisons, and a troubling share of college students need remedial work.
Graduation rates may not represent what they once did, so what happens after students finish high school matters at least as much as what happens in school.
When state legislatures go back into session in the new year, lawmakers should listen to social science researchers’ idea for quality course content that points to success after graduation and is backed by strong evidence. Educators and policymakers should be ready to listen.
These researchers study an oft-overlooked topic: family formation. Some have charted a course with their findings that could lead K-12 educators to lesson plans designed to promote student success in school and in life.
Researchers from the Brookings Institution, the American Enterprise Institute, the University of Virginia, and elsewhere consistently have found that married couples who have children have “higher family incomes and lower poverty rates” than unmarried couples who have children together. Students raised in two-parent, married families also do better in school and are twice as likely to graduate from college than peers who don’t live with married parents.
In fact, the outcomes for individuals who grow up in intact, married homes are consistently positive across key indicators, including incarceration (lower), poverty rates (lower), and education (higher).
All of this evidence supports what is known as the “success sequence,” a set of decisions and behaviors that lead young people to better life outcomes into early adulthood. If a student obtains a high school diploma, works after graduation or pursues a college degree, and gets married before having children, he or she is less likely to live in poverty as an adult.
And the numbers aren’t even close. A report on millennials (those born in the early 1980s to the mid-1990s) finds that 97% of those who followed this sequence “did not live in poverty when they reached adulthood.” The strong findings are nearly identical across racial lines, and some 80% of black and Hispanic adults who followed the success sequence “reached the middle class or higher by their mid-30s.”
The Heritage Foundation has designed a blueprint that school boards and educators may use to integrate the success sequence into classrooms. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
Heritage’s new model resolution includes evidence of positive outcomes from the success sequence and provisions that call on educators to teach students the benefits of each behavior.
The lessons are badly needed. The share of children living with married parents has declined by 12 percentage points over the past half-century, and nearly 1 in 4 children don’t live with married parents today. Marriage rates, in general, have fallen in recent years.
These data have serious implications for children. For example, 42% of federal prison inmates reported living with only one parent while growing up, while 47% of state inmates reported growing up with only one parent.
Boys from low-income homes who grow up without fathers “are particularly likely to be floundering at school and to be suspended at school,” Institute for Family Studies senior fellow Brad Wilcox said at a Heritage Foundation event in 2018.
The model policy doesn’t mandate that educators tell students to go to college after high school. It does, however, describe the evidence supporting the benefits of work or educational activity after high school and says educators should teach students the benefits of doing these things.
The policy also doesn’t require that teachers tell students to get married, just that students should know the positive outcomes that are more likely for themselves and their children if they marry before children are born.
Heading into 2024, school district boards and local educators may use Heritage’s resolution on the success sequence to give students and families hope in the present and for the future.
Evidence of the importance of finishing school, heading to the workforce or college, and getting married before having children is too strong to ignore. This is the kind of evidence that should be behind more classroom content.
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Who’s teaching the teachers?
At the height of the student protests in Melbourne, sixteen-year-old schoolgirl Ivy Bertram appeared on The Project to discuss her decision to help organise the pro-Palestinian rally. As Miss Bertram, an expert on Gaza and geo-politics, delivered pearl after pearl of wisdom, Mr Ali and his fellow hosts nodded in deference at the insight being proffered by this modern-day oracle of Delphi. Unfortunately, this new breed of political commentator currently gracing our screens typifies everything that is wrong with the education system in this country.
There is no doubt that Miss Bertram is simply repeating what she has been told by her teachers at school. But who is teaching the teachers, and what are they being taught at university? The Institute of Public Affair’s latest report, Who Teaches the Teachers? An Audit of Teaching Degrees at Australian Universities, answers these questions and confirms what we have long suspected: our education faculties have been completely beguiled by the forces of wokery, woke activism is deeply and irrevocably embedded into teacher training and universities are churning out legions of woke activist teachers.
Instead of being taught how to master core academic curricula such as reading, writing, mathematics, history and science, the report reveals that teachers are being trained by their university lecturers to be experts in critical social justice, identity politics, critical race theory, radical gender theory, social and emotional learning, and sustainability. Of the 3,713 subjects taught across 37 universities that offer teaching degrees, 1,169 are classified as woke, or as critical social justice. In contrast, a meagre 371 are devoted to teaching phonics, mathematics and grammar. It’s a wonder that children are able to spell ‘Climate Justice’ on their protest banners.’
Critical social justice and the accompanying theories now entrenched in Australian universities were pioneered by Brazilian Marxist educator Paulo Freire (1921-1977) as a theory of teaching known as ‘critical pedagogy’. Built on Marxist foundations, this sought to turn children into politically conscious participants in a perpetual revolution. Tellingly, Freire’s other heroes were Friedrich Hegel, Vladimir Lenin, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.
By the early 1990s, Freire’s ideas were added to by the social theorists in North American universities who introduced critical race theory and post-colonial theory into the mix. The influence of Freire and his disciples on the teaching landscape in Australia has been far-reaching and profound. He even came to this country in 1974, giving lectures on ‘authority and authoritarianism, conscientisation (critical awareness), violence, class struggle and illusions of neutrality’. Freire’s audience clearly tuned out while he was talking about illusions of neutrality.
As recently as 2021, the Brazilian Marxist was being lauded as ‘one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century’ by Australian academics at a conference held at the University of South Australia.
Critical social justice requires teachers to be agents of change, a message which is drummed into them throughout their four-year degrees. At Monash University, a student taking ‘Theorising Social Justice’ is told that the unit ‘aims to develop in you a strong grasp of the concept of “cognitive justice”, and the associated notions of “epistemic” and “epistemological” justice which will support you to engage with and give value to, the diversity of thought and different “ways of knowing” that can be applied to the pursuit of social justice in local, national, and international contexts, in educational settings and beyond’.
It also teaches them to approach Aboriginal education through the lens of critical race theory and post-colonial theory. At the University of Melbourne, Masters students ‘will engage in critical discussions and activities that enable them to reflect on the impacts of settler colonialism, racism and unexamined bias on First Nations educational sovereignties as well as build their understanding and awareness of Indigenous knowledges and strategies for working towards decolonisation’.
In extreme cases, such as ‘Rethinking Indigenous Education’ offered by Macquarie University, students are not only taught that all Western knowledge must be decolonised, but that they must also be proficient in ‘abolitionist, futurist and Indigenist thinking’. Those taking ‘Leadership in Indigenous Education’ at the University of Canberra are being taught to monitor the ‘attitudes, beliefs and behaviours of other educators around them’. There must be no wrong think in the classroom!
Sustainability is of course, inextricably linked to critical social justice, and maintains that a sustainable world cannot be achieved without a socially just world. Sustainability education is not confined to secondary education but commences at an early age. For example, students studying a Bachelor of Education Early Childhood and Primary at the University of New England are taught how to introduce children aged between two and five to sustainability in the sciences. At the University of Notre Dame, lecturers ensure that ‘a key aim is to empower pre-service teachers to integrate effective advocacy for sustainability in their professional teaching role’ while ‘strategies will be explored to enable young children to participate as active citizens and agentic leaders in protecting the environment for a sustainable future’. Meanwhile, Federation University is concerned with equipping students with ‘tools to embed environment and sustainability practices into primary and/or junior secondary education using interdisciplinary teaching and learning strategies’.
With teaching like this, it is no wonder that anxious young Australians are out in the streets protesting about the government’s supposed inaction on climate change. Almost since birth, they have been indoctrinated by their woke teachers with the narrative that the world is on the verge of a climate apocalypse. And it is of course hardly a coincidence that one in three Australian students can barely read or write, with an average of 33 per cent performing below expectations, while almost one in ten students is not achieving the expected learning outcomes for literacy and numeracy at their year level.
Under the federal government’s ‘back to basics’ plan, there will be a new accreditation regime for teaching degrees, and it will be mandatory for universities to instruct trainee teachers in evidence-based reading, writing, arithmetic, and classroom management practices. While this might be a step in the right direction, it will not address the fact that teachers are being schooled in ideologies which are not only incompatible with the notion of traditional education but also seek to tear it down. As long as woke courses dominate teaching degrees, I fear we will have to endure being lectured to by activist schoolchildren.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/12/whos-teaching-the-teachers/
******************************************************My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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